How much anime would you have bought without fan-subbing? Do you really think that you could not get the same information from teasers, reviews (internet and magazine), and word of mouth? That is how I do it. Strangely enough, I seem to know about the series everyone here keeps listing as things they discovered because fan-subbing.
Second, for every one of you, there are at least as many people who download like you but buy little or nothing. Does your hypothetical increase in buying offset their decrease?
then we are running the cleanest war in history by about five orders of magnitude. That is a good sign, not a bad one.
As for the bombs, I am proud we did what we did. It was more merciful than invading Kyuushuu, resulting in the deaths of millions of Japanese directly or due to starvation/disease the following winter. Also, using the bombs ended Japanese aggression throughout Asia. Thousands of innocents were dying each day in these areas.
You think the war was over? Here is a question for you. We dropped the first bomb on August 6th. How many Americans were killed on August 5th?
that don't need help. Things like GITS, Full Metal Alchemist, and Naruto (to name some recent examples) where huge in Japan and obviously destined to be big in the US as well. I do not think that fan-subbing helped such series in any way, while reducing their sales among the download-and-rarely-buy crowd.
You are right - bad series are also hurt by fan-subbing. That only leaves near-mythical "good series that no one would have known about" as the hypothetical beneficiaries.
Now what are the odds that a copy could produce more of the latter than the first two? Pretty low, don't you think? Even then, the company would gain a reputation and the situation wouldn't last. It also could use teasers, free episodes, and other methods of viral marketing, achieving similar effects to fan-subs without the downside.
I find it interesting that the author of this article assumes fansubbing is beneficial to companies. Where is the evidence? I searched google for a while but couldn't find much that was relevant. Slashdot should be based on fact, not on faith.
My experience runs just the opposite. I know a few big anime fans who don't download fansubs. They own thousands of dollars worth of anime each. I also know a few who are into the piracy game. They own a few particular series, but that is all. I am sure a few people who are both major downloaders and owners exist, but I have yet to meet one.
Can anyone provide links to the economic effects of piracy in this market, the corporate responses to piracy, or provide me with at least anecdotal evidence of someone who seriously follows the "download lots of fan subs, but still spends thousands on anime" model?
Go figure I always thought we entered WWII because of Pearl Harbor.
Now I want you to go find one of the families of one of those 250,000 men and women, and call their grandparent "chicken feed". Do you have the courage of your convictions? Or are you going to hide here in the obscurity of/.?
Also, stopping an advance is a long way from winning. Without the two-front invasion, Germany and USSR probably would have called it a draw.
We lost 250,000 soldiers liberating Europe's pathetic "#$. Go tell a real D-Day survivor that we just hung back and let the Reds do the dirty-work. I quadruple-dog dare you.
Up to it? I did not think so.
Btw, most native Americans died due to their lack of immunity to Eurasian diseases such as smallpox. This was an inevitable accident given the meeting of these cultures. Hyper-isolated events where someone may have done this on purpose made no difference, as every tribe was going to get hit with these diseases sooner or later.
We have higher incomes, higher growth, a far stronger military, are not breeding ourselves out of existence, and are being invaded by relatively benign Mexicans rather than hostile Muslims. We have the most innovative economy in the world, far more natural resources than Europe, the best university system, and consistently turn out most of the world's most innovative products and services.
Europe has some nice artwork and old buildings, though.
EU growth rates are stagnant and have been so for a long time, western European countries are breeding themselves out of existance, and the EU is militarily impotent.
If by "kindler and gentler" you mean "weak, dying, impotent, and cowering behind the military shield of the US", well, I guess you are spot on.
Even your demonstration of "technological competence" is merely a me-too copycat. Here is a pop quiz for you. What was the most important French invention of the twentieth century? I have asked this many times, and the only good answer I have ever heard was the bikini. Seriously.
Building a house is more dangerous for birds than building a windmill. There have been a few specific instances (perhaps Pacheco is one of them) where there were problems, but they were not "major" by any rational definition. These usually can be avoided by using larger windmills and intelligent siting decisions.
It sure looks like what I saw when driving between San Antonio and El Paso last year. At least in my opinion, I thought those lines of windmills running along the occasional ridge looked pretty cool. The three big windmills in my home state (Michigan, two at Mackinaw and one in Traverse City) also look very nice and from my perspective are not a detractor to these areas at all.
A line of six-mile distant windmills will not ruin the view. Anyone who subscribes to this theory should have one built right in their damned back yard.
Where the hell do you get that 80% number from? Pharmas spend roughly the same on advertising and R&D (this is generally true across many sectors of the economy). However, only about 10% of that advertising is direct-to-consumer. Half is free "sample" drugs that doctors give to the poor and eldery. Dear God, what a sin that is. The remainder is education for doctors.
In any case, information is valuble. Advertising is not waste.
because I only know one ipod owner without pirated music (yours truly).
Asking people "Hey, are you breaking the law?" and calling the result meaningful is rather specious, don't you think? It reminds me of a survey I saw in CNN the other day. Seventy-five percent of people claim that they do not find fat people unattractive. Yeah, right.
The speed of innovation is increasing all the time
As a "nano" researcher myself, I have started to almost think the tide is turning the other way. We have lots of momentum, but I no longer think we are accelerating.
Of course, it all depends on your measure. If you just count number of journal pages printed, or number of scientists researching, things seem hunky-dory. However, if you multiply that by the value of that information, it shrinks substantially. Science has become exceptionally incremental, and we are advancing via zerg-style attack rather than leaps and bounds.
At least from my position here on the inside, I feel that these estimates are quite optimistic.
An engineer from China or India is going to lower the wages of first-world engineers regardless of where he or she works. It is actually better for Australia to let these people come and work in their country - at least they can then collect the taxes as their own corporations make profits. Leave them in China or India and they will just compete from there, to the benefit of China and India and their companies.
You cannot stop the information from crossing the border, and that is what matters in the end. Since the primary product of science and much engineering is information, there is little one can do to stop globalization of these markets.
But you have hit the nail on the head. The questions being asked in the early 1900's were big but simple, and lended themselves to correspondingly important but simple answers. The unsolved questions that remain today are either big and hopelessly complex, or small and merely really complex. There will never be another "Einstein" because there simply isn't a pile of big questions with readily understandable answers remaining to be solved.
Yesterday, I had to work my way through an obscure polymer physics paper I found from 1995. The derivations were far more complex than Einstein's work and required much more mathematical sophistication. Yet this paper will probably not be read by more than a few hundred people and its authors will never receive fame and fortune because of it.
This reminds me of a broader point. As the number of scientists expands (there are more scientists working today than have retired in all of history), it becomes increasily difficult to do the following two things:
1: Follow what everyone else is doing
2: Have an insight that no one else already has had
I would estimate that 9/10 of my insights lead directly into someone else's previously published work. However, given the explosion of the literature, it is becoming harder to confirm this. I had the same insight as the authors of the paper I earlier mentioned. I spent probably a full day of work looking through the literature to see if I could find any information about this idea, and came up blank. I then actually began unknowingly reproducing the paper, and actually got comparible Monte Carlo results with a little simulation program I wrote (while failing at the derivation). Only after putting five days or so of work into the idea did I come across the paper in an obscure journal. Worse yet is getting "scooped", which occurs when you have an idea, put months of work into it, and then suddenly you find that someone publishes a paper nearly identical to the one you are working on. Unfortunately for you, they had the idea six months earlier than you did.
Comparing the results of today's scientists and those of a century prior are simply meaningless. The problems are smaller and more difficult, and the number of competitors has expanded exponentially.
Show me modern physics papers that contain math that most people with any scientific or engineering background can understand, and that are just a few pages long.
The unsolved problems that people are working on today are much more complex, so comparing the rates at which they are solved is meaningless.
When I was slogging through my 250 page PhD dissertation, I came across an article about disserations of such famous people as Schroedinger and other physicists of the 1920's - whose entire dissertations were about as long as Section 1.1 of my introduction.
Trying to compare now and then is all but irrelevant.
I attended a seminar on patent protection in my field (chemistry). Most of the speakers were patent attorneys. Basically, the overall theme of their presentations was "we can help you hoodwink the patent examiners", basically by flinging lots of overly-broad @#$# against the wall and hoping the over-burdened examiner lets some stick.
While patents are probably a necessary evil, the system does need to be reformed, and far fewer patents need to be granted.
Slashdot Mirror
How much anime would you have bought without fan-subbing? Do you really think that you could not get the same information from teasers, reviews (internet and magazine), and word of mouth? That is how I do it. Strangely enough, I seem to know about the series everyone here keeps listing as things they discovered because fan-subbing.
Second, for every one of you, there are at least as many people who download like you but buy little or nothing. Does your hypothetical increase in buying offset their decrease?
then we are running the cleanest war in history by about five orders of magnitude. That is a good sign, not a bad one.
As for the bombs, I am proud we did what we did. It was more merciful than invading Kyuushuu, resulting in the deaths of millions of Japanese directly or due to starvation/disease the following winter. Also, using the bombs ended Japanese aggression throughout Asia. Thousands of innocents were dying each day in these areas.
You think the war was over? Here is a question for you. We dropped the first bomb on August 6th. How many Americans were killed on August 5th?
There were plenty of reviews and other information of Cowboy Bepop. Fan-subbing was not the only "filter" you could have used.
See my response above. You, or any other half-way concious anime fan, would have learned about almost all of these series without fan subs.
that don't need help. Things like GITS, Full Metal Alchemist, and Naruto (to name some recent examples) where huge in Japan and obviously destined to be big in the US as well. I do not think that fan-subbing helped such series in any way, while reducing their sales among the download-and-rarely-buy crowd.
You are right - bad series are also hurt by fan-subbing. That only leaves near-mythical "good series that no one would have known about" as the hypothetical beneficiaries.
Let's see: good+popular=lower sales bad=lower sales good+unknown= higher sales
Now what are the odds that a copy could produce more of the latter than the first two? Pretty low, don't you think? Even then, the company would gain a reputation and the situation wouldn't last. It also could use teasers, free episodes, and other methods of viral marketing, achieving similar effects to fan-subs without the downside.
Particularly the short story "The Laughing Man", which can be found online, and of course "The Catcher in the Rye".
You cannot fully understand the series without understanding these works.
I find it interesting that the author of this article assumes fansubbing is beneficial to companies. Where is the evidence? I searched google for a while but couldn't find much that was relevant. Slashdot should be based on fact, not on faith.
My experience runs just the opposite. I know a few big anime fans who don't download fansubs. They own thousands of dollars worth of anime each. I also know a few who are into the piracy game. They own a few particular series, but that is all. I am sure a few people who are both major downloaders and owners exist, but I have yet to meet one.
Can anyone provide links to the economic effects of piracy in this market, the corporate responses to piracy, or provide me with at least anecdotal evidence of someone who seriously follows the "download lots of fan subs, but still spends thousands on anime" model?
Go figure I always thought we entered WWII because of Pearl Harbor.
/.?
Now I want you to go find one of the families of one of those 250,000 men and women, and call their grandparent "chicken feed". Do you have the courage of your convictions? Or are you going to hide here in the obscurity of
Also, stopping an advance is a long way from winning. Without the two-front invasion, Germany and USSR probably would have called it a draw.
Our debt/GDP ratio is hardly unusual, and we have much better growth and demographic trends than they do.
Crackpot.org?
We lost 250,000 soldiers liberating Europe's pathetic "#$. Go tell a real D-Day survivor that we just hung back and let the Reds do the dirty-work. I quadruple-dog dare you.
Up to it? I did not think so.
Btw, most native Americans died due to their lack of immunity to Eurasian diseases such as smallpox. This was an inevitable accident given the meeting of these cultures. Hyper-isolated events where someone may have done this on purpose made no difference, as every tribe was going to get hit with these diseases sooner or later.
We have higher incomes, higher growth, a far stronger military, are not breeding ourselves out of existence, and are being invaded by relatively benign Mexicans rather than hostile Muslims. We have the most innovative economy in the world, far more natural resources than Europe, the best university system, and consistently turn out most of the world's most innovative products and services.
Europe has some nice artwork and old buildings, though.
Just because Rush says it doesn't make it false.
EU growth rates are stagnant and have been so for a long time, western European countries are breeding themselves out of existance, and the EU is militarily impotent.
If by "kindler and gentler" you mean "weak, dying, impotent, and cowering behind the military shield of the US", well, I guess you are spot on.
Even your demonstration of "technological competence" is merely a me-too copycat. Here is a pop quiz for you. What was the most important French invention of the twentieth century? I have asked this many times, and the only good answer I have ever heard was the bikini. Seriously.
Building a house is more dangerous for birds than building a windmill. There have been a few specific instances (perhaps Pacheco is one of them) where there were problems, but they were not "major" by any rational definition. These usually can be avoided by using larger windmills and intelligent siting decisions.
It sure looks like what I saw when driving between San Antonio and El Paso last year. At least in my opinion, I thought those lines of windmills running along the occasional ridge looked pretty cool. The three big windmills in my home state (Michigan, two at Mackinaw and one in Traverse City) also look very nice and from my perspective are not a detractor to these areas at all.
A line of six-mile distant windmills will not ruin the view. Anyone who subscribes to this theory should have one built right in their damned back yard.
You are lumping administration in with marketing. Admin is 25%, R&D 10%, marketing 6%.
Again, nothing unusual there.
Where the hell do you get that 80% number from? Pharmas spend roughly the same on advertising and R&D (this is generally true across many sectors of the economy). However, only about 10% of that advertising is direct-to-consumer. Half is free "sample" drugs that doctors give to the poor and eldery. Dear God, what a sin that is. The remainder is education for doctors.
In any case, information is valuble. Advertising is not waste.
because I only know one ipod owner without pirated music (yours truly).
Asking people "Hey, are you breaking the law?" and calling the result meaningful is rather specious, don't you think? It reminds me of a survey I saw in CNN the other day. Seventy-five percent of people claim that they do not find fat people unattractive. Yeah, right.
We grow nano machines.
Darned engineers got it all backwards.
The speed of innovation is increasing all the time
As a "nano" researcher myself, I have started to almost think the tide is turning the other way. We have lots of momentum, but I no longer think we are accelerating.
Of course, it all depends on your measure. If you just count number of journal pages printed, or number of scientists researching, things seem hunky-dory. However, if you multiply that by the value of that information, it shrinks substantially. Science has become exceptionally incremental, and we are advancing via zerg-style attack rather than leaps and bounds.
At least from my position here on the inside, I feel that these estimates are quite optimistic.
An engineer from China or India is going to lower the wages of first-world engineers regardless of where he or she works. It is actually better for Australia to let these people come and work in their country - at least they can then collect the taxes as their own corporations make profits. Leave them in China or India and they will just compete from there, to the benefit of China and India and their companies.
You cannot stop the information from crossing the border, and that is what matters in the end. Since the primary product of science and much engineering is information, there is little one can do to stop globalization of these markets.
But you have hit the nail on the head. The questions being asked in the early 1900's were big but simple, and lended themselves to correspondingly important but simple answers. The unsolved questions that remain today are either big and hopelessly complex, or small and merely really complex. There will never be another "Einstein" because there simply isn't a pile of big questions with readily understandable answers remaining to be solved.
Yesterday, I had to work my way through an obscure polymer physics paper I found from 1995. The derivations were far more complex than Einstein's work and required much more mathematical sophistication. Yet this paper will probably not be read by more than a few hundred people and its authors will never receive fame and fortune because of it.
This reminds me of a broader point. As the number of scientists expands (there are more scientists working today than have retired in all of history), it becomes increasily difficult to do the following two things:
1: Follow what everyone else is doing
2: Have an insight that no one else already has had
I would estimate that 9/10 of my insights lead directly into someone else's previously published work. However, given the explosion of the literature, it is becoming harder to confirm this. I had the same insight as the authors of the paper I earlier mentioned. I spent probably a full day of work looking through the literature to see if I could find any information about this idea, and came up blank. I then actually began unknowingly reproducing the paper, and actually got comparible Monte Carlo results with a little simulation program I wrote (while failing at the derivation). Only after putting five days or so of work into the idea did I come across the paper in an obscure journal. Worse yet is getting "scooped", which occurs when you have an idea, put months of work into it, and then suddenly you find that someone publishes a paper nearly identical to the one you are working on. Unfortunately for you, they had the idea six months earlier than you did.
Comparing the results of today's scientists and those of a century prior are simply meaningless. The problems are smaller and more difficult, and the number of competitors has expanded exponentially.
If you pick a dozen stocks at random and wait thirty years, you will have about a 99% chance of having made money, after inflation.
In gambling, the odds are against you by a few percent. With investments, the odds are with you by a few percent. This makes a profound difference.
Show me modern physics papers that contain math that most people with any scientific or engineering background can understand, and that are just a few pages long.
The unsolved problems that people are working on today are much more complex, so comparing the rates at which they are solved is meaningless.
When I was slogging through my 250 page PhD dissertation, I came across an article about disserations of such famous people as Schroedinger and other physicists of the 1920's - whose entire dissertations were about as long as Section 1.1 of my introduction.
Trying to compare now and then is all but irrelevant.
I attended a seminar on patent protection in my field (chemistry). Most of the speakers were patent attorneys. Basically, the overall theme of their presentations was "we can help you hoodwink the patent examiners", basically by flinging lots of overly-broad @#$# against the wall and hoping the over-burdened examiner lets some stick.
While patents are probably a necessary evil, the system does need to be reformed, and far fewer patents need to be granted.
at a group as this professor did, the "anti" label is well earned.